AS innovator Sir James Dyson announces plans to invest in a new robotics lab, will a domestic R2-D2 ever become a reality?

When you possess a 300-acre estate in Gloucestershire, a chateau in France, a town house in Chelsea and the largest British-owned superyacht, it must be easy to feel overwhelmed by household chores. Sir James Dyson’s Cotswold place alone has 51 bedrooms and 40 bathrooms, which is a lot of dusting, polishing and hoovering, so it’s lucky he has a £3billion fortune to pay for all the domestic staff he wants – not to mention the suction power of the bag-less vacuums that helped him make his name and wealth.

But it’s no wonder he has been thinking about machine-led assistance. “My generation believed the world would be overrun by robots by the year 2014,” he said at the weekend, announcing a £5million investment in a robotics research lab at Imperial College London.

“We have the mechanical and electronic capabilities but robots still lack understanding – seeing and thinking in the way we do. Mastering this will make our lives easier and lead to previously unthinkable technologies.”

If we have learned anything in the past decade or two, it’s that the unthinkable can become not just possible but virtually compulsory within a generation. People carry around in their back pockets computers that would once have been the size of an entire floor of an office, taking it for granted that these devices will tell them which direction to go, take a photo of them doing it and let them communicate their thoughts to the world as they go.

So it may seem farfetched to think we’ll all be living like Luke Skywalker from Star Wars, with R2-D2s or C-3POs whistling and clattering around the house, or like Frank Langella’s jewel thief in the film Robot & Frank who loses his memory but bonds with his android companion. But doesn’t recent history teach us that the more amazing the technology sounds, the likelier we are to be living with it before you can say “Isaac Asimov”?

Dr Nick Hawes, senior lecturer in intelligent robotics at Birmingham University and co-ordinator of the EU-funded Strands project to develop intelligent mobile robots, warns that the sci-fi model of robots acting as butlers and keeping us company with chirpy chit-chat is a diversion. He says there are some things that humans are very good at which robots just can’t do, such as using language naturally – “It’s almost impossible to explain how difficult it is because it seems so natural to humans” – or using vision to convey complex understanding. But he says developments are taking place all the time in situations where humans and robots can work together.

“In the classic factory model of automation, you build cars with robot arms, a couple of joints of metal with some kind of thing on the end that does something. But that arm doesn’t use any feedback from the world. It just repeats the script. So if you tell it, ‘Go left 10cm, go up 10cm, then press a button’, that’s what it will do. Even if you turn the lights off in the factory and take away the cars from the conveyor belt, it will still do that,” he says. “That’s great for a controlled environment where everything is predictable and known but the problems you can solve are quite limited. What we’re looking at is the application of artificial intelligence to give the robot a bit more flexibility and allow it to cope with a bit more environmental uncertainty.”

Classic examples are the smart machines that are already being marketed to vacuum your home while you’re out or mow your lawn while you watch, or the warehousing robot that the online retailer Amazon has started using in some of the giant sheds from which it dispatches goods. Human packers stay in one place while the robots, which are like boxes on wheels, fetch the items from the shelves for them.

“Nothing is in the exact position and what you need to pick up changes, so this is one of the most successful deployments of intelligent robotics we have seen so far,” says Hawes. “What we need to do now is look for more tasks like that, more problems in day to day life that you can solve in that way.”

Sir James has admitted that his long-standing ambition is to create a robot-controlled vacuum cleaner using a vision system that would tell the machine where to go. He has been working on a version of it for more than a decade at his headquarters in Wiltshire but so far he remains dissatisfied by poor battery life and the prototypes’ inability to navigate around normal domestic obstacles such as chairs and tables.

In Japan an android-shaped robot called Twendy-One has been created that has enough strength to support humans as they sit up and stand but has a gentle enough touch to pick up a loaf of bread without crushing it. It looks like the kind of robot companion that science fiction has always imagined for us but a glance at YouTube shows that it is painfully slow at performing tasks and is far less versatile than its appearance suggests. When it was first unveiled it had just 15 minutes of battery life and it has a tendency to overheat.

But it’s clear from the behaviour of some of the world’s biggest technology companies that this is where they think the future lies. Google has recently acquired eight robotics companies including Boston Dynamics, which makes robots for the US military, and a London-based artificial intelligence firm called DeepMind Technologies, for which the internet giant paid £400million.

Japan has developed the Twendy-One robot which is what the past visions of the future were made of [AFP/GETTY]

My generation believed the world would be overrun by robots by the year 2014

Sir James Dyson

Hawes says the immediate challenge for the robotics industry is to pinpoint large-scale cleaning or monitoring tasks in places like hospitals, schools or prisons, where the scale of the jobs to be done is big enough to justify the expense.

He also predicts another major application: the care for the elderly or disabled.

“One of the big funding pressures in Europe at the moment is the drain that ageing people systematically put on health care,” he explains. “If you can find ways to get them living in their homes longer, that really helps.

“You won’t get the robot that will come in and make a cup of tea but you might get a robot that can tell the manager of the home or your carer that you’re all right, using a remote control Skype system, and maybe do tasks like hoovering.”

His Strands project, also based in Birmingham, is currently working with the security company G4S on a prototype night watchman robot, and with a care home in Austria to build robots to assist nursing staff in monitoring tasks. That in theory would free them to spend more quality time with residents.

In our own homes, some robotics applications creep up on us without us noticing. Many of us already have a robot to do the washing up, for example – it’s called a dishwasher. Likewise the trouser press can do the ironing. It may not be realistic to expect one robotic device to do several tasks, and we may have to buy them one by one. “I’d think of them as another form of white goods for your home,” says Hawes.

He maintains that more sophisticated domestic robots will remain the preserve of the rich bachelor geek for the foreseeable future but he acknowledges that, for a long time, you could have said the same thing about personal computing – and just look where that ended up.

So if the technology moguls are moving into robotics, maybe the TV adverts of 10 years hence will be devoted to what brand of robot we’re meant to buy our loved one for Christmas.

“The scale and speed at which information software can grow is a lot greater than the speed and scale of businesses that are actually based on physical things, so maybe the hardware side is a better comparison,” says Hawes. “

In 20 years there will be big progress and robots will be something we’re a lot more familiar with. I don’t think they’ll be in all our homes but we won’t think twice when we see them in certain situations.

“They won’t look like R2-D2 and C-3PO but they’ll be doing special purpose tasks such as cleaning, hoovering and picking things up.”